Archive for March, 2005

I hope this session works in extreme socratic mode. Everyone in the room will get called on to contribute both questions and answers. The stuff below is just a foundational list.

I’d like to situate the discussion between two poles. On the one side, Business Week says: “Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere.” Are you looking forward to working for MSM?

On the other side, with MSM clearly collapsing — Tribune Circ rev down 9% in a year! — somebody intelligent BETTER step into the vacuum that will occur when the current media ecosystem finally (soon) collapses.

So, some categories of discussion:
– what are bloggers’ “unique selling propositions” in the info-economy? (Remember, MSNBC.com sells ad space for $0.10 CPMs!)
—- * passion
—–* networkness
—–* audience loyalty
—–* influentials audience
– what technologies/services currently enable bloggers to efficiently monatize their audiences?
—–* Blogads, Adsense, Pheedo
– are indie bloggers unsafe for advertisers… or safer?
– what is the current/potential role for publishers (traditional or newmedia) versus indies in the economics of blogging?
—–* NYT, Salon, Slate, BusinessWeek
—–* Gawker, MarketingVox, PaidContent, WeblogsInc, Corante, GrassrootsMedia, HuffingtonPost
– what new technologies/services might help indie-bloggers monatize their audiences?
– how many bloggers will earn a living from blogging in 5 years?
– do bloggers compete with each other for ad$?
– unless anyone vehemently disagrees, I’m going to leave discussion of “getting hired to do blogging as PR for a company” for another session. Many people will make a good living doing this in coming years, but I think that career path is pretty clear, so would like to focus on murkier/bigger stuff.

Original post: Robert Cox, the gyroscope steering the Media Blogger’s Association has pulled together a great Bloggercon in Nashville May 6-7.

My jam session will be modeled on the session Jeff Jarvis orchestrated at Bloggercon II. Though I don’t normally talk as fast as Jeff, I’ll be sure to drink plenty of coffee and get everyone in the room talking and resonating about where things are going.

I’m off this week and will post a draft outline for the session when I’m back. I’m glad there’s a session on making money — self-supporting bloggers are the future of media. (As both historic curiousities and benchmarks, here are posts I wrote about the topic three years ago and two years ago.)

In any other industry, a product that lost 1 percent of market share for two decades ‘ only to then double or triple that rate of decline ‘ would be declared dead. The manufacturer would discontinue it and rush out a replacement product more in line with the desires of the marketplace. So, let’s finally come out and say: Newspapers are dead. They will never come back. By the end of this decade, the newspaper industry will suffer the same death rate ‘ 90-plus percent ‘ that every other industry experiences when run over by a technology revolution.

So why do newspapers linger on? Why do so many papers refuse to accept reality and metamorphize into real Web presences rather than merely online downloads of their print copy?

One answer is that most newspapers are unbelievably retrograde. They grew up in a world of newsprint and that’s where they intend to stay. They cannot believe an institution as venerable as the newspaper can ever go away.

The second is a help-wanted ad from Oceana.org, which I fondly recall was the first DC advocacy group to buy blogads back in ’03:

Oceana is looking for a skilled web developer to use open source to help us in our mission to save the world’s oceans. We believe in the potential of the Web as an advocacy medium, and you’ll be helping us bring it to life — applying technologies like Linux, PHP, MySQL, RSS, and other cool tech along the way. If you love open source and want to make a real difference in the world instead of just grinding out cookie-cutter web sites, come join us!

Now you can tell your pajama-bashing friends that the data from last week’s blog reader survey indicates that 70% of blog readers are influentials, those articulate, networked 10% of Americans who set the agenda for the other 90%. (RoperASW, the folks who wrote the book on Influentials, have more information on the definition on influentials here.)

I guess the CBS guy just forgot to mention that those pajamas are silk, not rayon.

When I mentioned 70% data last Friday at the panel on influentials at the George Washington University conference on Online Politics, Carol Darr, the institute’s director, said this ratio correlated with the data that her group had observed last year in a study of influentials online.

To put the blogosphere’s influentials density in context, consider that the WashingtonPost.com likes to brag that 34% of its readers are influentials. (See bottom of page 4 on this PDF.)

MediaPost did a good job synchronizing last week’s blog reader poll with Gallup’s survey, also published last, indicating that only 32 of Americans are even somewhat familiar with blogs.

Frank Newport, editor in chief at Gallup poll, says his results are not inconsistent with Copeland’s conclusion. Newport compared readers of blogs to readers of The New York Times. “We know that only a fraction of the American public reads the Times, but it affects everyone because that’s what the people who control mainstream media read.”

“In conducting our poll, it was not our intent to measure blogs’ gross influence,” said Newport. “I think it’s obvious that the most influential people in our society are the ones who read these things.”

For another angle on the same topic, see Kate Kaye’s post about my question to the WashingtonPost.com’s Cliff Sloan at Friday’s IPDI debate.

Senator Harry Reid tells RawStory “What has happened in recent years, the Fairness Doctrine has been taken away, that is, equal time for pros and cons on an issue. And they also allowed the concentration of media power, so one station, one owner can own 1,200 radio stations. What this means is that wealth and power control most everything in this country. But one thing they do not control’wealth and power does not control the Internet. Through the Internet, regular ordinary people have a voice. That’s why I go out of my way to communicate any way that I can on the Internet and I think the blogs are a tremendously important way for the American public to find out what’s really going on.”